The History of the Internet

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Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennae to broadcast radio pulses. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on October 4, 1957. It was visible all around the Earth and its radio pulses detectable. The surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis, began the Space Age and triggered the Space Race, a part of the larger Cold War. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments… Continue reading →

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The launch of Sputnik 1 and the failure of its first two Project Vanguard launch attempts rattled the American public; President Dwight D. Eisenhower referred to it as the “Sputnik Crisis”. — Wikipedia: Sputnik Crisis

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military. DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many technologies which have had a major effect on the world, including computer networking, as well as NLS, which was both the first hypertext system, and an important precursor to the contemporary ubiquitous graphical user interface… Continue reading →

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Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J.C.R. or "Lick" was an American psychologist and computer scientist considered one of the most important figures in computer science and general computing history. He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing, and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer, with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built. He did much to actually initiate all that through his funding of research which led to a great deal of it, including today's canonical graphical user interface, and the ARPANET, the direct predecessor to the Internet… Continue reading →

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The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet-switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. An IMP was a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer with special-purpose interfaces and software. In later years the IMPs were made from the non-ruggedized Honeywell 316 which could handle two-thirds of the communication traffic at approximately one-half the cost. An IMP required the connection to a host computer via a special bit-serial interface, defined in BBN Report 1822. The IMP software and the ARPA network communications protocol running on the IMPs was discussed in RFC 1, the first of a series of standardization documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)… Continue reading →

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The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was one of the world's first operational packet switching networks, the first network to implement TCP/IP, and the progenitor of what was to become the global Internet. The network was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) within the U.S. Department of Defense for use by its projects at universities and research laboratories in the US. The packet switching of the ARPANET, together with TCP/IP, would form the backbone of how the Internet works. The packet switching was based on concepts and designs by American engineer Paul Baran, British scientist Donald Davies and Lawrence Roberts of the Lincoln Laboratory. The TCP/IP communication protocols were developed for ARPANET by computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf… Continue reading →

External links:

• Living Internet: ARPANET – The First Internet

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The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the development of email. There is one report that indicates experimental inter-system email transfers began shortly after its creation in 1969. Ray Tomlinson is generally credited as having sent the first email across a network, initiating the use of the "@" sign to separate the names of the user and the user's machine in 1971, when he sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10. The two machines were placed next to each other. Tomlinson's work was quickly adopted across the ARPANET, which significantly increased the popularity of email. For many years, email was the killer app of the ARPANET and then the Internet… Continue reading →

During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, research departments in universities were making huge technological strides forward that contributed greatly to the birth of the Internet. UCL in particular, had a prominent role and made the first UK connection to the ARPANET, making the enterprise international for the first time. — Peter Kirstein, University College London

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The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite (IP), and is so common that the entire suite is often called TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, error-checked delivery of a stream of octets between programs running on computers connected to a local area network, intranet or the public Internet. It resides at the transport layer… Continue reading →

The date was March 26, 1976, and the ARPANET — the computer network that eventually morphed into the internet — had just come to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, a telecommunications research center in Malvern, England. The Queen was on hand to christen the connection, and in the process, she became one of the first heads of state to send an e-mail. — Wired: How the Queen of England Beat Everyone to the Internet

External links:

• History.com: 8 Things You May Not Know About Queen Elizabeth II

“Spam” is a popular Monty Python sketch, first televised in 1970. In the sketch, two customers are in a greasy spoon café trying to order a breakfast from a menu that includes Spam in almost every dish. The term spam (in electronic communication, and general slang) is derived from this sketch. The sketch was written by Terry Jones and Michael Palin. — Wikipedia

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Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email (UBE), is a subset of electronic spam involving nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Clicking on links in spam email may send users to phishing web sites or sites that are hosting malware. Spam email may also include malware as scripts or other executable file attachments. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk… Continue reading →

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Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was developed from the general purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects, and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Usenet can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums… Continue reading →

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Scott Fahlman was the first documented person to use the emoticons :-) and :-(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion. The text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44), was thought to have been lost, but was recovered 20 years later by Jeff Baird from old backup tapes… Continue reading →

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
 
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
        
:-)
        
Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use
        
:-(
									

— Scott Fahlman, 1982

January 1, 1983, was an official 'flag day' for the ARPANET, which became what we know as the Internet. On that day, the collaborative operators of the existing networking hardware turned off the old networking protocol, NCP (network control protocol), and the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)-based Internet became the norm. — Internet Society: 30 Years of TCP – and IP on everything!

…it’s obvious it was a momentous occasion. On that day, the operational Internet was born. TCP/IP went on to be embraced as an international standard, and now underpins the entire Internet.

It’s been almost 40 years since Bob and I wrote our paper, and I can assure you while we had high hopes, we did not dare to assume that the Internet would turn into the worldwide platform it’s become. — Vint Cerf: Marking the birth of the modern-day Internet

External links:

• Network Working Group: NCP/TCP TRANSITION PLAN (1981)
• Internet Society: 30 Years of TCP – and IP on everything!
• Google Blog: Marking the birth of the modern-day Internet
• Internet News: 30 Years of TCP/IP Dominance Began with a Deadline
• Living Internet: TCP/IP Internet Protocol

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Using a simpler, more memorable name in place of a host's numerical address dates back to the ARPANET era. The staff at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) created and updated a file named HOSTS.TXT that mapped intelligible names to the numerical addresses of computers on ARPANET. SRI transmitted this file, and updates of this file, to each computer connected to ARPANET, which later became the Internet. The Internet's rapid growth required an automated system for maintaining and distributing domain names and their corresponding numerical addresses, to replace SRI's centrally maintained, manually entered HOSTS.TXT file… Continue reading →

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HyperCard was an application program and programming tool for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers, that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web.

It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, a programming language for manipulating data and the user interface… Continue reading →

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